The David Pakman Show - 121125 Tanker Seized By Antiwar President As Jobs Problem Grows

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

-- On the Show -- Donald Trump orders a military-style seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker in international waters while offering no credible legal basis for the action -- Jerome Powell warns that job losses are mounting and inflation is rising due to Donald Trump's tariffs and reduced economic data -- A major measles outbreak worsens in South Carolina as anti-vaccine sentiment fueled by Donald Trump's administration drives down immunization rates -- Donald Trump delivers confused remarks at a public event, invents achievements, and shows little understanding of the policies being discussed -- Donald Trump promotes a million dollar "Gold Card" that he claims grants a direct path to citizenship while ICE targets lawful immigrants following the rules -- Donald Trump visibly shows yellowing skin, bruises, swelling, and repeated bandaging as the White House refuses to explain his declining physical condition -- Donald Trump turns the White House East Wing into an unusable construction pit after firing the lead architect and demanding an unrealistic ninety thousand square foot ballroom -- Donald Trump strengthens his control over government institutions while losing popularity by making elections and public opinion less relevant -- On the Bonus Show: A bidding war is underway over Warner Bros, the Senate will vote on two healthcare proposals, Trump wants tourists to disclose five years of social media activity, and much more… 🛍️ Shopify: Sign up for $1/month trial and start selling today at https://shopify.com/pakman 🛡️ Incogni lets you control your personal data! Get 60% off their annual plan: http://incogni.com/pakman ⚠️ Ground News: Get 40% OFF their unlimited access Vantage plan at https://ground.news/pakman 🖼️ Aura Frames: Use code PAKMAN for $35 off Carver Mat frames at https://auraframes.com/pakman 🩳 SHEATH Underwear: Code PAKMAN for 20% OFF at https://sheathunderwear.com/pakman -- Become a Member: https://davidpakman.com/membership -- Subscribe to our (FREE) Substack newsletter: https://davidpakman.substack.com -- Get David's Books: https://davidpakman.com/echo -- TDPS Subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/thedavidpakmanshow -- David on Bluesky: https://davidpakman.com/bluesky -- David on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/davidpakmanshow (00:00) Start (01:53) Trump seizes Venezuelan oil tanker (09:42) Powell warns on jobs and inflation (19:07) Measles outbreak worsens in South Carolina (25:26) Trump gives confused public remarks (36:30) Promotes million-dollar "Gold Card" (43:24) Trump's health visibly deteriorates (50:09) East Wing construction chaos (55:45) Consolidates control over government  

The man who calls himself the anti-war president just sent American troops to seize an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. We're talking about helicopters and ropes and tactical teams and the whole thing. And when reporters asked what happens to the oil in the tanker, Trump says, I think we keep it. I don't know if this is foreign policy or simply piracy. We'll talk about it. We will then get to the economy where the Fed chair Jerome Powell drops a brutal warning and says he believes, leaves not only is inflation going to be trending up, but that the terrible jobs numbers we've been seeing may actually be better than the truth. In other words, that the real job situation may be even worse.

And meanwhile, the Fed is making decisions about interest rates with most of the data missing because the Trump administration has canceled or delayed yet. We will also talk about measles. This is not an episode from 1925. This is an episode from 2025. The measles circumstances and outbreaks are exploding under Donald Trump. Anti-vax nonsense from RFK Jr. is part of it. And we are also going to talk about whether authoritarian's need to be popular or whether

the whole point of being an authoritarian is that you no longer need the people on your side. Plus, new photos of Trump once again show how bruised, bandaged and yellow he is. legacy and corporate media is barely interested in the story. Also, now that we've demolished part of the White House, is there a plan to rebuild and to put it back together? The truth is terrifying, but I will tell you because I would never hold back the truth from you. All of that today. The United States just seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela.

This was not like a paperwork transaction. This was an armed operation with the helicopters and the ropes and tactical teams boarding a foreign ship on international waters. Fox News aired the footage and you can see American forces repelling onto the deck as if this is really a military raid, not a legal process related to sanctions. Now, according to reporting from the New York Times, this is a tanker that was carrying Venezuelan oil and was previously involved. in smuggling Iranian oil. And the idea here is there was a seizure warrant as a on the basis

of this. It was issued two weeks ago. And the Trump administration went ahead and said, yes, we are going to do it. Now, there really isn't much in the way of a legal explanation here, right? We got like a sentence. Venezuela is saying that this is barefaced robbery, saying that this is internet. international piracy being carried out by the United States. And you can't look at this and argue that this is normal. You know, a U.S. judge issuing a warrant simply doesn't give the United States the authority to seize a foreign vessel in international waters, which is what we're talking about here. Maritime law doesn't work that way.

Sovereignty doesn't work that way. And these are all things and principles that the Trump administration says that they respect. And the White House has also not explained which part of international law do you believe you're operating under here when you go and do this. Now, there's also a question of what happens to the oil. We don't really, there's been no official statement about what happens to the oil and what happens to the ship. They haven't clarified was the warrant for the oil or for the vessel or was it for both?

Trump was asked, well, what happens now to the oil on the tanker that you seized? And Trump's kind of like, I guess we keep it. I don't know. What happens to the oil on this ship? Well, we keep it, I guess. When you have to follow the tanker. You know, you're a good newsman. Just follow the tank.

You know, follow it. Follow it. Follow it. Get a helicopter. Follow the tank. But we're going to, I guess so we're going to keep the oil. Wow. You know, that really doesn't sound to me like the winner of the feet.

the winner of the FIFA Peace Prize that Donald Trump was given the other day. So we sort of have to go through and think about the underlying justification and philosophy here, much like we have been having to think about it with regard to the strikes against supposed narco trafficking boats, including the now infamous war crime double tap strike. You know, the, you can't say that this is self-defense, right? I mean, it's like the crew didn't resist. There was no threat to American vest. There was certainly no imminent attack from this vessel.

It wasn't a hostile encounter in the sense that the vessel was being aggressive towards American resources or anything like that. So once you establish that, and I can't imagine that anyone in the Trump administration would dispute that because that's clearly not what's going on here. Self defense in international law requires an actual immediate danger. It can't be a ship with a bad history and a foreign government. that Donald Trump doesn't like. That doesn't justify action on the basis of self-defense. We also have to ask a broader question, which is, is this now part of an ongoing military

operations? Some might even say, is this a war or a warlike project? Because if you go back just a couple of months to September, we've talked about it all along. The United States has carried out now, reportedly more than 20 strikes on boats in the region killing over 80 people, the double tap of narco trafficking strike is one of them. And this is a different thing. This here we took the vessel and now we, I guess we're taking the oil. This in total, arguably you could say, I mean, listen, you've got over 20 strikes. Trump has moved over 15,000 US troops and a dozen ships into the Caribbean, including

the Gerald Ford aircraft carrier. He is authorizing covert action against Venezuela. He's telling reporters that other things are happening and he's being cagey and kind of kind of playing coy. He's not saying what those things are. And his supporters have insisted Trump's the anti-war guy. But this is kind of looking like a war. And I know that people will write to me and they'll say, David, it's not a war by definition because war hasn't been declared. Come on, guys. What are we really going back to that at this point in time? We have a president escalating military activity in the region using force without any authorization for the use of military force, seizing a foreign ship,

I guess taking its cargo. Trump's like, I guess we keep the oil. Also threw into this a sort of threat to the president of Columbia saying the president of Columbia had better wise up or he's going to be next. So this is not the true anti-war candidate. This is not restraint. This is certainly not diplomacy. It's an American president threatening to target multiple other countries because he feels like it.

And all of it is happening after Donald Trump got the very prestigious FIFA Peace Prize. Maybe Gianni Infantino is going to have to rethink whether Trump was the most suited recipient for the nascent and newly created prize. So obviously, I know you all know this, but this is the opposite of a peace posture. This is not a president who goes first to peace. It's a classic pre-war pattern of raids, seizures, covert activity, threats, and meanwhile, it's a growing military presence in the region. I don't want to say it's like when Putin was massing troops on the border with Ukraine.

It's not really like that, but it's tangential to that. And if Trump were truly anti-war, we simply wouldn't be watching the video that I played for you of armed agents boarding foreign ships and keep hearing talk about a keeping the oil from Donald Trump. We wouldn't see troop increases. We wouldn't see covert action. We wouldn't see aircraft carriers being moved into the region. Now, I think it's important to mention, uh, with regard to the Venezuelan leader, Nicholas Maduro, who I am completely against. Remember, I'm an anti-authoritarian. So I'm against Trump's authoritarianism and I'm against Maduro's authoritarianism and I was against Chavez's is authoritarianism.

Maduro understandably lost it after the seizure. Now, I think Maduro is terrible for the Venezuelan people, but I still have to consider and appreciate what is the law and what are the circumstances of this seizure. Maduro started saying, this is piracy. She said, Venezuelans need to be ready to kick in the teeth of the United States. He said this is theft by the United States. And he's not wrong, at least about the stakes of this because the ship was carrying over a million barrels of oil. And this is the United States disrupting Venezuela's oil business directly.

Not a defense of Maduro. I think he's terrible. I would love for him to go. But I don't want the United States being the ones doing the regime change, obviously. But this is shaping up to escalate. it's not looking good. Also not looking good is the latest warning from the Fed chairman Jerome Powell. The Fed chairman Jerome Powell is now warning that the American economy is losing jobs, which we knew, even though Donald Trump canceled the official jobs reports, we still have others. And the Fed

chairman Jerome Powell also believes that the job losses may be worse than the data we even have. this coming on the heels of a decision to cut interest rates. Let's take a listen. Why do we move today? You know, I would say point to a couple things. First of all, gradual cooling in the labor market has continued. Unemployment is now up three-tenths from June through September. Payroll jobs averaging 40,000 per month since April. We think there's an overstatement in these numbers by about 60,000. So that would be negative 20,000 per month. So understand what he just said. He says if you go all the way back to April, remember, only over the summer did we start

knowing we were losing jobs. What Powell is saying is if you go all the way back to April, the average numbers are plus 40K a month, which is terrible, by the way. The numbers we believed were plus 40,000 jobs a month. He believes that's been overstated by 60,000 jobs per month, meaning we've actually been losing 20,000 jobs per month. So the jobs situation, a warning from Jerome Powell. Issue number two, inflation. Jerome Powell also saying that he expects pricing, prices

to continue going up, and he points directly at the tariffs. Total PCE prices rose 2.8% over the 12 months ending in September and excluding the volatile food and energy categories core PCE prices also rose 2.8%. These readings are higher than earlier in the year as inflation for goods has picked up. reflecting the effects of tariffs. So put together the picture that Jerome Powell is painting for us. You know, Trump wanted his rate cuts. The Fed typically cuts rates when it finds that there is trouble brewing in the economy or active

trouble and says we will cut rates to try to buoy a sinking economy. Trump has been saying for a while, we need rates well, way lower. Well, now Jerome Powell is saying look at what's happening with inflation due to tariffs. at what is happening to the jobs market. Now it's time for us to actually go and to cut the rates. One more from Jerome Powell. And here he says that over the near term, he expects inflation to go up. In the near term, risks to inflation are tilted to the upside and risk risks to employment to the downside, a challenging situation. There is no risk-free path for policy as we navigate

this tension between our employment and inflation goals. A reasonable base case is that the effects of tariffs on inflation will be relatively short-lived, effectively a one-time shift in the price level. Our obligation is to make sure that a one-time increase in the price level does not become an ongoing inflation problem. But with downside risks to employment having risen in recent months, the balance of risks has shifted. Our framework calls for us to take a balanced approach in promoting both sides of our dual mandate. Now, there is another aspect to this where, you know, there's sort of like a, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs where it's difficult to put a lot of time into self actualization.

If lower on the hierarchy of needs, you don't have access to food. You don't have access to shelter. There's a hierarchy of needs. Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Everybody learned it in, you know, high school psychology class. Not every, okay, I shouldn't say that. Many people learned that in high school psychology class. There's something equivalent to this when it comes to observing and evaluating the political situation in the United States of America. And what I mean by that is the following.

There is an important question in the economic space about if you're worried about inflation, you could take an economic approach of letting inflation, letting employment cool a little bit. In other words, what I mean is the following. If employment is not as full, it doesn't mean we have an unemployment crisis. But if employment is not as full, that can actually put downward pressure on prices because fewer people can afford things. Sucks for them, right? I'm not lying about that. I'm speaking unemotionally about something that is people's lives. But oftentimes in economics, you have to speak unemotionally about policy. And some people get hurt by it. But I'm trying to give you the theory.

You could argue the inflation issue to a degree could take care of itself if employment does cool. But of course, then there's people who are going to lose jobs. But that is a that is considered a valid piece of economic theory. That could be considered. Does the Fed need to act to keep unemployment as low as four to four and a half percent, which can push inflation because so many people have jobs and can afford to buy things? Or is there an approach where you say, let's let employment cool in order to ease up on the inflation? We can't even have that conversation because we're busy dealing with the president putting

in place blanket tariffs that make no sense, attempting to bully the Fed chairman Jerome Powell into dumping rates three or four points, et cetera, et cetera. We've got to bail out the farmers. Because we have so many self-inflicted crises as a result of Trump, there is really no space for a broader conversation about economic policy and what it should be in an economy, the size and maturity level that the United States economy currently finds itself. Just throwing that in there so people know, we're busy trying to put out fires, but there are broader discussions about the future of the economy that adults could and should be having,

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profiling by ad companies. And Incogni's data removal process is the only one verified independently by Deloitte. This gives them a unique level of credibility. Try Incogni risk-free and get 60% off when you go to incogny.com slash Pacman and use the code Pacman. The link is in the description. The David Packman show is, of course, a viewer. supported program. If you have someone in your life that could use a David Pacman show membership,

either because they like the show but can't afford a membership or because they are hardcore right wingers and you want to try to deprogram them by giving them a membership to the show. You can gift memberships. They make great stocking stuffers under the Christmas tree on the festivist pole near the Hanukkah menorah, whatever, anything, right? Um, you can go to join packman.com and check that this is a gift box. And then after purchasing, you can enter the recipient's information and the gift membership will be sent to them. The measles outbreak is accelerating. This is not a headline from the 1950s. This is not an old episode of the show. It's December of 2025. This is the headline in the United States under Donald Trump. We have yet another measles outbreak. Due to growing anti-vaccine sentiment. The latest outbreak is in South Carolina. It is accelerating because of Thanksgiving travels effect on an anti-vax church.

Now, when I say that, I'm not alleging the church itself is officially anti-vax. I am saying that the outbreak is based around unvaccinated congregants of a particular church. And this stuff is spreading like wildfire. Of the 111 measles cases in the area, 105 were unvaccinated. Consider how effective the vaccine is based on that information. Another three of the cases were partially vaccinated. So presumably what they mean by that is kids get two doses of MMR, measles, mumps, and rubella. You get the first one around 12 months and the second dose, usually before kindergarten at age four, sometimes five. During that interdose, that interim period where you've had one dose, you're considered partially vaccinated.

So in addition to the cases, mostly among the unvaccinated, we have 254 people in quarantine in South Carolina. And a lot of this outbreak traces its way to the way of truth church in Inman, South Carolina. This is a preventable disease recently spoke to our pediatrician about travel with the baby. And I said, you know, what do you? worry about if we travel prior to 12 months of age, which we did with my first daughter. And the pediatrician said, well, listen, we do want them to have the MMR vaccine. If you travel before 12 months, we can move that vaccine up a little bit. But interestingly, she said right now, she would be far more worried about us going to Texas than going to France with regard to measles. 20 of the cases in this,

calling at the upstate South Carolina outbreak, 20 of the cases involve kids under the age of 5. 75 cases are kids between 5 and 17. And if you look across the state of South Carolina, the rate of students with vaccines has gone from 96% down to 93.5% in the 2025 school year. You might say, well, that doesn't sound like a big difference. It is a big difference because measles is so contagious. Measles has such a high reproduction rate. that in order to maintain something approximating herd immunity, you really need a very high rate of vaccination. Now, you might say, well, isn't this the responsibility of the governor or of the church or local officials? Of course, all of that is true. But we have to sort of contend with the

reality that at the very top right now, from on high in the federal government in the White House, in the Department of Health and Human Services, we have a president and in particular, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who have coddled and incubated and sort of reinforced anti-vaccine sentiment. It's important, I think, to mention that as Trump has sort of taken advantage as much as he can of anti-vax sentiment and skepticism about vaccines and bringing in Bobby as he calls him, Trump is continuing to get his flu and COVID vaccines every single year. He seems to know the reality about vaccines, but also on understands the political circumstances in which he is trying to benefit from anti-vaq sentiment.

Remember that back in the year 2000, the U.S. declared measles eliminated, meaning no more domestic spread for over 12 months. And look at where we are right now. We had eliminated measles thanks to the vaccine. And measles is now back thanks to the anti-vaccine sentiment. Now, as of two days ago, I don't know how many of the South Carolina cases are in. included in these numbers. As of two days ago, there were 1912 confirmed cases in the US in 2025 and 47 outbreaks of measles in 2025. 92% of the cases were not vaccinated against measles and only 4% of the cases are fully vaccinated

vaccinated. Think about those numbers. The vast majority of the cases, we've got a map up on the screen, are in just a few states. Texas has the most. Then you have South Carolina, which we are talking about here, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. You will also notice that if you look at New England, there are zero cases in Maine, zero cases in New Hampshire, zero cases in Massachusetts, Zero cases in Connecticut. Rhode Island has one case and Vermont has two cases. These are stunning numbers that should really serve to remind us. This is optional.

And to me, the fact that it's optional means that it is completely immoral. Now, I know that there are people in my audience who will write in every time we talk about this and say, you know, David, not vaccinating is a form of child abuse. children should be taken from their parents if they don't give safe and effective vaccines and expose their children to these risks. I don't know what my position is on that. I'm still thinking that through. But what is clear is that legality aside, criminality aside, there is no doubt that there is no moral justification for exposing children to potentially serious and and deadly conditions when we have such an effective and safe vaccine.

Criminality, I don't know. I want to hear some legal arguments on that and feel free to write in info at David Pacman.com if you have one. Donald Trump is now exhibiting corruption so blatantly in public that it is stunning the people that sit around him. Donald Trump had another meeting yesterday at the White House and Trump is talking about the gold card. now live. I looked at the application yesterday. We're going to dig into that a little more in a

in a later segment. But the gold card lets you buy citizenship to the United States. Here is Trump's sort of justification explanation. I guess you would call it for this. Listen, get a load of this. There's no two gifts. It's a gift of getting somebody great coming into our country because we think this will be some tremendous people that wouldn't be allowed to say, you know, they graduate from college. You have to go back to India. They have to go back to China. They have to go back to France. They have to go back to wherever they came from. Very hard to stay. It's a shame. It's ridiculous things. We're taking care of that. The companies are going to be very happy. I know Apple's going to be happy. A lot of the companies, nobody talked to me more about it.

And Kim Cook, he said it's a real problem. And it's not going to be a problem anymore. As you know, they used to send people up to Canada and other places, other countries. So we solved that. And the other thing is it'll take in, we think probably billions of dollars that will go to the Treasury of the United States. We'll go to an account where we can do things positive for the country. So it'll be a great thing. We'll take it, I think, you know, billions of dollars.

So a lot here. There's a lot of material here. First of all, when Trump talks about billions of dollars are going to come in from this at a million dollars a pop. It is relevant and important just to remember that there are pay for citizenship programs in many countries around the world. And they don't get a lot of participants and they are way less expensive. We actually went through the numbers when Donald Trump first announced this initiative of the citizenship gold card. There really aren't that many people globally that can afford this, even though I know that Trump knows a lot of millionaires. Trump also has dropped

the price significantly from $5 million to $1 million, probably recognizing there is not as much of a market at the $5 million level. Was it five or even 10 originally? In any case, they've dropped it to a million dollars. The other aspect of this, and this came up at Donald Trump's rally in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania earlier this week as Trump goes, we don't want people from shithole countries, but we want Norwegians and Swedes and people from Finland and Denmark. The truth is that people in those countries are very happy and very few of them want to

move to the United States, even if it's free. not going to uproot their lives to come to the United States. They're certainly not going to do it for a million dollars or two million dollars. So Trump, as many on the right often do, wrongly assess that most of the world would come to the United States if given the opportunity. Most wouldn't. And it really is mostly limited, either to people who work in certain industries where the US is really the place to be or or people who are in dire economic straits or in other circumstances where abandoning everything you know and often the language that that you speak and everybody that you know seems like a good trade off to take your chance in the United States.

That that is relatively a small number of people. Now, the other interesting aspect to this is the conflict that exists between a lot of the MAGA America first anti-immigration stuff, which Donald Trump paid lip service to for a long time. And the kind of reality of people like Trump, Elon Musk, Vivek, Ramoswamy, all of whom have said, no, no, no, we've got to bring people in. And crucially, Trump kind of gives up the game there because he goes, you know, nobody pushed this more than Apple CEO Tim Cook, also known to some as Tim Apple. And that is a reminder that these are the quid pro quos, Tim Cook increasingly in Trump's circle. And now Trump is doing something that goes against what a lot of MAGA wants,

but it is certainly something that, that Tim, Tim Cook likes. Here is Howard Lutnik talking about, the pricing of this buy your way into citizens. Howard, maybe you'll give a little description of the Trump gold card, please. Sure. So for an individual, it's $1 million, and for a corporation, it's $2 million. And as the president said, for a corporation, they spent $2 million. They can then have an employee. Full betting. The best vetting the government has ever done, $15,000 vetting to make sure these people absolutely qualified to be in America, absolutely qualified. Then the company can keep them in. The primary qualification is that they have the $2 million. And they have a path to citizenship, right? Obviously, they have to be perfect people

in America. And having passed the vetting after five years, they'll be available to become citizens. And then the corporation put someone else on the card. So for a company, They can keep putting people on the car, one person per card. And for an individual, it's a million dollars and it's a gift to the United States of America to help America. What a gift. What a gift, what a gift, what a gift. So we're going to get back to the gold card and the sale of citizenship, but Donald Trump

granting favors out in broad daylight. Trump also very casually mentioned, oh, well, we seized the tanker from Venezuela. And lots of other things are happening to. Well, thank you very much. It's been an interesting day from the standpoint of news. As you probably know, we've just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela, large tanker, very large. Very big. Largest one ever seized, actually. And other things are happening. So you'll be seeing that later. Big news day. Trump excited about the big news day, but it got a little risky. When tech elements came up and I want to ask you the following very simple question about the clip

I'm going to play, do you think Trump has any idea what the cloud is based on these 27 seconds of video? We also are grateful to be joined by Enrique Lores of HP. So thank you very much. Thank you. Great job you're doing. Antonio, Mary of HP Enterprise. Thank you very much. What's a different between HB and HB enterprise. We focus on the cloud security netports in large systems. The cloud's good. People have been very well with the cloud. People are doing things in the clouds that you can't even imagine.

Okay, so does Trump have any idea what the cloud is? Now almost a requisite of any financial or economic-related meeting, Trump's completely fake investment numbers. You're looking at 150, 150 billion. That's good. I don't know. You already gave 6,250. Do you have a, have you stated a number that you're at for investment, future investment?

Well, you know, if I, if I think about all the, you know, investment that we make with the American companies that are adding capacity, particularly around semiconductors, it's several hundred billion dollars. I think that's good. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty good. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty good. It makes the six, makes it six billions sound very, very small. That's very good. Antonio, what about you guys? What about you?

Please, everybody go around giving me these numbers of absolutely no meaning or substance. And then what is this really about? It's about the following, which is Trump's lies acting like he brought back cash in a bag from the Middle East. So there's a big turnaround in 10 months, the $18 trillion dollars. It's a record. There's never been a country that's gotten anywhere near that in the Middle East. When I left the Middle East, we brought back $3 trillion and lots of Boeing airplanes like 300. And Boeing gave me the award for the greatest salesman in the history of Boeing, which is a

nice little award. So anyway, as you all know, the American economy is $27 trillion. Trump didn't bring back $18 trillion. He didn't bring back $20 trillion. What Trump brought back are the generic and non-binding promises. And I don't even really call it. them promises from various Middle East leaders who said, yeah, you know, if you've got some projects that are a good fit, we might invest 600 billion over the next 10 years. And that's a big if, but Trump wants you to believe he just packed bags of cash on Air Force One and brought all the money back. He's going to keep telling this lie because it's all he's got at this point in time.

Donald Trump has already packed his second term cabinet with loyalists. He's threatened deportation as political punishment. He's expanded executive authority. in ways we have not seen in modern history. These are real changes that are happening right now. And what's even more alarming is that a lot of the media is either glossing over the worst of it or they're reframing it so it all sounds a little more palatable. And that is why I use ground news. This is a news comparison tool.

Doesn't just feed you headlines. It shows you. Here's how different outlets left, right center, are covering the same story. And this is one of the few tools I know of that can really help you detect the political spin, the bias catch stories that your usual sources might downplay or not cover at all on everything from immigration policy to economic shifts. If you want to get a bigger picture, a broader picture of what's being reported, ground news is an invaluable source to keep you informed.

And ground news is offering my audience 40% off their top tier vantage plan. You'll only pay five bucks a month. Go to ground. news slash Pacman or enter the code Pacman in the app to get started. The link is in the description. A lot of people hit this point in December and realize I still need to find a thoughtful, genuine gift for someone on my list. And quickly, if that is you, Aura frames can really help you out. Our sponsor, Aura, makes premium digital frames that beautifully display photos and videos. I've been using one myself for years. I've given aura frames to my mom. I've given them to my dad. So many people.

I preloaded them with baby photos and they love it because they turn it on the first time and the pictures are there. Orra makes it really easy not only with the preloading of photos, but you can keep adding them throughout the year with the app. There is plenty of time to get an aura frame shipped before Christmas and you'll get $35 off their best set. selling Carver Map frames. When you go to auraframes.com and use the code Pacman at checkout, the link is in the description. All right, let's dive into the ability to buy citizenship in the United States. Trump is now selling citizenships online.

He launched the Trump gold card, which he says is a direct path to citizenship for anyone who is qualified and vetted. The primary qualification is, do you have a million dollars? to give the government to buy a citizenship. This is the immigration system when you put in place a failed businessman president. It's not merit. It's not the rule of law. It's a million bucks in cash or two million if you're a corporation.

Can you wire the money? Congratulations. You're one of the best and brightest and you're on the way in citizenship in the United States. Trump posted the announcement with gusto and excitement on truth social. He says, quote, the United States government's Trump gold card is here today, a direct path to citizenship for all qualified and vetted people. So exciting. Our great American companies can finally keep their invaluable talent.

Live site opens in 30 minutes. Howard Lutnik, as we looked at earlier, is right there singing the praises of all of this. He appeared on CNBC to talk about it. And I'm going to play this clip where Howard sort of talks about the just the rationalization for such a policy. And remember that this goes directly against much of the MAGA America first stuff instead of America first, higher American, it's we need people from other countries to come in here. And by the way, I agree that that's the case.

I have been saying for a very long time, especially for those worried about fertility rates and all of this stuff that Elon Musk talks about, one of the most economically stimulative of things the United States can do is probably triple the number of legal immigrants that are coming into the United States for economic reasons. A lot of MAGA didn't agree with that. A lot of MAGA doesn't like this. The realists on this issue like Vivek Ramoswamy and Elon Musk. And again, they are realists because they understand how it affects their businesses.

They are for more of this. Trump told Laura Ingram recently, we don't have the talent domestically. We have to bring it in. A lot of MAGA doesn't like it, but here is Howard Lutnik explaining it to to Joe Kernan on CNBC. A lot of times I do not look immediately for the downside to something, but I'm sure people are at this point. But if the president says Tim Cook has actually pushed for this policy,

I think that's a pretty good endorsement that maybe the president's on to something here. So you've got to be able to bring in the best and brightest to the country. You know, this concept where you just get online to come into the United States of America, Can you just come on in? I mean, the average green card holder in America makes one third less than the average American. We should be bringing in the best and the brightest. And that's what Donald Trump is changing about our immigration system. Let's expedite the best and the brightest.

We're going to give a million dollars to the United States to prove they're at the top of the list. I guess just the... Now, the truth, of course, is a million dollars. doesn't make you the best and it doesn't make you the brightest. It just means you have a million dollars or you work for a company that's got two million dollars. You might not even have earned the money yourself. First of all, having a million dollars that you earned yourself doesn't necessarily mean anything. But it also doesn't mean that you earned it yourself. You don't need to have contributed a damn thing to society. You could inherit every dime. You could do nothing. And Trump will say

you're a model immigrant, you're the best and the brightest because now you've got the money for the entry fee. Now, meanwhile, and this is the part that that really tells you everything, ICE recently rated a citizenship oath ceremony. Okay. These are the people who did everything that the system asks of them. They studied, they paid their fees, they waited, they passed their interviews, they followed every single rule. They showed up on the last day to become Americans. And instead of a congratulations, ICE agents show up. Now, of course, the ICE agents might have been there, not for those who are becoming U.S. citizens, but thinking, oh, there might be people attending the ceremony that are of interest to us.

Doesn't matter, right? The optics of ICE at an immigration, at a citizenship oath ceremony, while you can buy a citizenship for a million bucks is really making the message very clear. And the message is, if you are a regular person following the process, ICE might come after you. are rich enough, he'll hand you a gold card and say you're a national asset. You're one of the best and brightest. And it is Trumpism. That's the essence of Trumpism. Principle doesn't exist. Ideology barely matters. Moral center. There's no moral center. It is loyalty and money. Trump's two favorite

currencies. And if you have enough of the latter, you can kind of skip the entire immigration system and just buy your way to the end. It's like, you know, the people who play the the game on their phone for free and they're grinding, but somebody with money can just buy all the right items and chotchkes. Did I make that analogy correctly? I'm sure the gamers will tell me. And of course, the implications are much broader than just the gold card because this rewrites the idea of what what is citizenship even, right?

Because for centuries, becoming American meant you belonged here. You've lived here. You've contributed. You played by the rules. you became part of the civic project. Trump is replacing it with a financial transaction, right? Citizenship is a luxury item. It's a premium upgrade.

You turn citizenship into a product and you're turning people into customers or you're turning them into revenue streams rather than model citizens. And so what I think is the darkest downstream effect of this, if I really think about it, is that when a country starts selling, it, it's a country. its most fundamental rights to the wealthy. It stops seeing the non-wealthy as fully human, which I think is probably something that comes very naturally to Donald Trump based on how he was raised. And so when you have rich applicants that can be fast-tracked for citizenship, what happens

to the refugees? What happens to the students? What happens to families waiting years in the legal pipeline? You don't really matter as much because you don't have the million bucks. And so we have an immigration system that is going to mirror the way Trump sees the world. is the primary value of people. Loyalty is right up there as well. And the people who go through the hard work are just not going to be able to get as good of a deal. Terrifying, disgusting. I would argue anti-American, but it's what Donald Trump is doing. Donald Trump is yellow,

covered in bruises and band-aids. And it is long now time to tell the American people what is going on with Donald Trump's health because at this point, it is obvious that something isn't right. Now, Aaron Rupar, our friend, has a great piece about this on his substack called a Band-Aid on a festering hand wound where Aaron sort of analogizes the band-aids that Trump is doing with policy to the band-aids that are literal items on Donald Trump's hands to cover up whatever's is going on with his health. Read the piece by Aaron that we are linking to. he pulls together the pictures and the quotes and the timeline and all of the entire thing. I think it's very good and very much much worth looking at.

But if we zoom out, what is the situation in which we now find ourselves? Well, Trump's physical condition is clearly declining. And the White House is doing everything it can to try to hide this. And Aaron Rupar starts with the hand. And he explains that going back months now, Trump's right hand is not only often discolored. it's also often bandaged. And he has the pictures of that and he shows them to us. This is clearly not a scrape. It's a recurring issue. Trump has been hiding his hand when he can for months. He covers it with the other hand in public. He holds papers over it. He tried makeup. Now he's using

bandages. And Aaron shows the shots from the Pennsylvania rally earlier this week where the hand looks extremely swollen. It looks gray. It looks like it's rotten and patched together. with band-aids. And then Aaron points to something that really jumps out here, which is that the hands, because of Trump's face makeup, where he makes himself orange, although sometimes it's looking more yellow than orange, it only reinforces Trump's ashy gray hands. Something is very wrong, and they don't want us to know what. Now, the article continues. And it says, remember, Trump had the swollen ankles over the summer. He vanished for about a week around Labor Day. There was no explanation. He's regularly falling asleep in public five or six times over the last 10 days, including during

a cabinet meeting. It's not metaphorical that Trump's asleep at the wheel. He is asleep while people are talking about policy. And the White House's spin only raises more questions. You've got Caroline Levitt saying the ankle swelling is chronic venous insufficiency. All right. Well, what about the bruised, colored bandaged hands. Well, it's from shaking hands with people. And it's a laughable, laughable explanation. And it sounds like they're trying to come up with this stuff in real time and often two weeks late. Then we've got the MRI. Trump admitted, yes, I got an MRI during one of my two annual physicals. Make sense of that. Now he says, well, I don't even know why doctors ordered it. If your uncle said after getting an MRI, I don't know why I got an MRI, the family would be saying,

what's going on with the with our uncle, right? It wouldn't make any sense. In his article, Aaron Rupar also includes Donald Trump's unhinged attacks covering, uh, attacks on the New York times for covering his decline. We talked about that yesterday or the day before and Trump said, oh, it's seditious to talk about my allegedly failing health. It might even be treason suggesting that maybe it's criminally actionable if you talk about Donald. Trump's health. And so what we really have to do here, I believe, is zoom out and see this for the bigger picture that it is. And Aaron does a really good job in the piece, which is the health issues with Trump, the erratic reaction and the cover up attempts. They match Trump's escalating erratic

behavior. Okay. And a lot of these issues we've talked about, quiet piggy and the other outbursts, particularly at female reporters. The xenophobic and racist rants about Somalis. The weird comments about women including talking just two days ago about how attractive Caroline Levitt is and how her lips go bop, bop, bop like a machine gun. Threats to foreign leaders now saying to the leader of Colombia, you'd better watch out or you're going to get the Venezuela treatment. Wise up or you will be next. And so you put it all together, physical decline media secrecy, cognitive testing, naps during meetings, angry outbursts. This is not a stable man. This is not a stable person. And the inner circle around him is working overtime to try to hide it.

Now, at the end of his piece, Aaron points out, there is undeniable evidence that something is wrong here. And we don't exactly know what that is. And if there weren't something wrong, we wouldn't be seeing the attacks on reporters. Trump wouldn't be hiding his hand in increasingly conspicuous ways. They wouldn't be giving us ridiculous explanations like Trump's. bruised up from shaking hands. So the bottom line, as we are about to enter 2026 and really be in the midterm cycle is that Trump's health is a serious issue. It seems to be affecting his

judgment. It seems to be affecting his behavior. And the White House is only fueling that belief by being very opaque about what's going on. We've got pictures. We have statements. We have Trump sleeping six times in public in the last 10 days. The American people deserve the truth. They always deserve of the truth about the health of the president. We are not getting it right now. A lot of guys go years without ever thinking about their underwear. You just keep buying the same kind, dealing with the same discomfort, the sticking, the chafing, the readjusting.

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Pacman. The link is in the description. The construction or lack thereof, really, of this new White House ballroom is quickly becoming not only a global humiliation, but it's also becoming a financial disaster. And it's becoming embarrassing for Americans who now look at Washington, D.C. and see a demolished part of the White House and a stalled construction. So let me tell you what is going on. We've been covering over the last six months, really in Trump's second term, how Trump is increasingly obsessed with legacy.

How is he going to be seen? What is what sort of permanent marks can he make on the country on Washington, D.C. They might be metaphorical marks. They might be legislative or political marks. And they might quite literally be construction. Like how do I change the White House? Trump has turned the White House into a construction disaster zone and is struggling to find an architect willing to finish the job. Now, I told you that there was a stall in the project.

The entire thing started when Trump demolished the East Wing with no real plan, no public review, no respect for the fact that this is one of the most historically significant buildings in the country. And the relevance and the timing of all of this is that the total. Demolition has happened and the project now appears to be at a standstill. We have images of what's going on at the White House at this point in time. Trump has been insisting on building this 90,000 square foot ballroom that would be so big that it would dwarf the actual executive residence. And the architect that he had chosen James McCrary the second said this doesn't work. This doesn't work. In addition to the obvious, you know, an addition is not supposed to overshadow the building that it's attached to. Trump didn't like hearing that as he doesn't when somebody tells him no. And he said to McCrary, bye, bye, you are gone.

So the project is now frozen. The east wing has already been torn down. There is a construction pit next to the White House. Costs have gone from what was going to be 200 million, 250, 300 million. Now there's even talk of 325 or 350 million. And there is still as of today not a functioning approved deal. design for what they want to do. They tried to scramble to bring in a new architect from Washington, D.C. doesn't fix the underlying

problem, which is that Trump is demanding something that is physically unrealistic. He ignored every warning. He fired the one person who tried to stop this from becoming a disaster. And if the story sounds familiar, this is Trump's business history. You know, I was thinking back to when Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee for president back in 2012, Barack Obama was easily reelected. Romney was, to be frank, he was not anywhere near the worst Republican candidate that they've put up there, but he didn't really make the case for kicking Obama out, given that things were going pretty fine. One of the arguments

that was made with Romney from supporters of his was we really need a businessman president. We need someone who thinks like a business person and who will run the country like a business. And one of the things that was often argued about was is Mitt Romney a good business person because part of what he did was take companies apart and okay. But let's step back from that for a second. A lot of us were saying what proof do we have that good business people make good presidents? Running a business and running a country are two different things. And of course, we don't really have good evidence that business people make good presidents.

And that is yet another thing we are reminded of. of with Donald Trump. But Trump was a particularly bad business person and he'd have more money today if he had simply invested his inheritance in an index fund rather than done anything with it. And then we get into the details. Trump says, oh, I'm a great builder. I'm a great deal maker. Project after project of Trump's blows past budgets, ends in lawsuits, collapses under mismanagement. And that's what's happening with him as president. Trump loves big announcements. I'm making a major promise and getting a lot of attention to spectacle, the cameras. Then the work starts. The competence now. is required and it all falls apart. He leases his name out to buildings he doesn't run and

blames other people when it fails. He walks away from incomplete projects. He leaves investors and contractors and workers holding the bag and he's doing the same damn thing with the White House. Now, there were people defending this when he started it saying, we need a refresh. It's going to be great. It's going to look good. And a lot of those people are now saying this isn't seeming like a great idea. And what Trump has now saddled the country with putting aside for a moment the disastrous tariff policy, the disastrous immigration policy, the failed foreign policy, put all of it aside. Just with the White House demolition, we have a half demolished presidential complex because Trump was obsessed with a gigantic ballroom.

He couldn't be bothered to go through the process of evaluating the project, keeping it to historical standards, architectural actual evaluation and planning, tears it down. They have no final blueprint. The architect says this won't work, fires them. And now we've got no architect, no clear path forward and a crater worth, I guess, $300 million in the sense of what it'll cost to replace it. That's the builder at work who would run the country like a businessman and fix everything. Destruction, no preparation, complete chaos.

This is why we don't need someone like a Trump in the White House to begin with. All right, I want to talk about such an important question that a couple of you wrote to me and asked, does Trump's lack of popularity matter if he is governing as an authoritarian? And I believe that this is a phenomenal question. We've covered that Donald Trump's approval rating is tanking. Trump is down in Nixon era approval rating. Trump's own approval rating has only been worse in the two weeks of his first term that came after the January 6th riot.

So it's a complete and total disaster. Some of Trump's allies are bailing. If you look at the polls, you would say, well, the story is going to end because voters will step in and they're going to fix everything. They're going to take the House and Senate from Republicans next November and Trump will be left to blah, blah, blah. I believe that that is a mistake. Popularity is only a problem in a functioning democracy.

And the whole point of an authoritarian project like Trump is to make popularity a relative to irrelevant. On a personal level, Trump cares so much about being liked and being popular. But the part that Americans may not want to hear is that we often will treat a political crisis like it's going to be solved by the next election. And sometimes we can solve problems with elections and elections are always important. But the danger isn't Trump or Republicans losing an election. The danger is Trump changing the system where the outcome of elections no longer matters.

And there is a long history here to look at. If you look at authoritarian movements and how they start, they almost always start the same way, which is they do win. At the beginning, the authoritarian's often win, although not in every case, but in most cases, they win a real election. Sometimes they win a real election by a lot. There's economic anger. There's cultural resentment.

There's a promise that somebody is going to come in and restore order and they find someone to scapegoat and they go, I will finally deal with this. And so often authoritarian start with a win. Hitler didn't seize power with 10% approval. He was the most popular politician in Germany. Victor Orban was legitimately elected. Putin, you know, Putin's had some sketchy elections, but Putin was by most measures very popular in the early 2000s, which is now over 20 years ago. We see this often.

Once they get in, the project changes. And the goal shifts from I want broad support to I'm going to take broad control over institutions, over systems. The legislature becomes just a rubber stamp. The courts are either packed or ignored. The press is intimidated and co-opted or labeled an enemy. Does that sound familiar? Universities are seen as ideological threats. Elections, we have them, but they're kind of more symbolic.

You know, we'll go through the ritual of the election. but only if it confirms the regime, not if it restrains it. And what happens over time is that the system starts to rely less on votes and more on fear propaganda and bureaucracy and the slow erosion of every check and balance which used to make a difference. And the darkest irony of this is that these leaders tend to become less popular as they become more powerful. Russia by and large has a huge portion of the population that doesn't like Putin.

But they're terrified to actually make that. make their voices heard. Hungary is arguably exhausted with Orban. Germans were terrified of Hitler long before the end. But by the time that the mass dissatisfaction becomes impossible to deny, there's no exit ramp. You can't get off the train. Elections don't fix it. Laws don't restrain it. Courts don't do anything.

And so people can no longer vote their way out. So when folks say, don't worry, you know, Trump is, Trump is losing support. I always think losing support is not. not the most important part of the story. Is Trump losing power? And the answer is, I don't think so. There are some Republicans starting to doubt Trump, and that's important. But the truth is Trump doesn't really need a big coalition. He needs loyalists in the courts. He needs them in federal law enforcement in the military chain of command and state legislatures if they're willing to bend election rules. And if it gets that stuff, the polls kind of don't matter anymore. And this is exactly

how democracies will slide into something different. You know, you got a leader, starts weakening parts of government that they can't control, strengthening the parts of government that they can control. You don't have to ban the election. Make it irrelevant. It's much easier. Don't jail every critic. Show that there is a cost to dissent and they will self-censor. And just look at our timeline. Trump has purged inspectors general. He's tried after 2020, tried to strong arm a secretary of state into finding votes. Ask the DOJ to declare the election corrupt and leave the rest to me. He's demanded in the second term personal loyalty from federal officials. He tried to undo an election he lost.

And that was all arguably the rehearsal. So now he's here. He's openly preaching about and seeking revenge. He's doing purges. There's military crackdowns. And none of it has any subtlety. It's the authoritarian playbook. It's been around a long time.

Use democracy to gain power. Dismantle democracy. so that you don't need it anymore. So Trump is historically unpopular. But unpopularity only matters in a system that reflects the public will. And Trump is trying to destroy the system that reflects the will of the people. So I believe that the bigger, you could say a strong authoritarian is a danger. And you would be right. But a weak authoritarian is arguably even more of a danger because the weak authoritarian no longer tries to win anybody over. They try to make the will of the people not matter. That's what we're up again. So Trump's approval rating is highly relevant to understanding

what's going on. It's important in thinking about voters turning on Trump. It's important in thinking about other Republicans saying, I don't know that this is the horse we want to write into 2026 on all of that matters. But as far as like, oh, Trump will no longer yell at the media and show a total lack of respect for courts if people don't like him. No, no, no, no, no. Trump will double down on those actions, the less that people like him. And that should terrify every single one of us. We have a phenomenal bonus show today. We will talk about healthcare proposals.

We will talk about this Warner Brothers Netflix whole thing and what role the administration might play in that. And we will also talk about a new proposal by the administration to review five years of social media history before letting someone visit the country as a tourist. Is this what we need when tourism is down 15%. I would say no, but we will talk about it on today's bonus show. Sign up at join packman.com. Also make sure you're getting my daily newsletter on Substack.

It is free at substack. .davidpackman.